With the introduction of new powerful mobile devices and the popularity of multimedia applications, the traffic over mobile communication networks has been increasing exponentially. This puts a great pressure on the mobile communication networks, whose capacity cannot increase as fast and may be limited by physical, financial, or regulatory reasons. Therefore, multiple offloading technologies have been introduced to alleviate traffic load from the operator's core network, e.g. the Local IP Access (LIPA) and Selected IP Traffic Offloading (SIPTO) (NPD 1), and the non-seamless WLAN offloading (NSWO) (NPD 2), etc.
With LIPA or SIPTO, a User Equipment (UE) accessing the network via cell/cells of a HNB/HeNB can obtain access to network that is connected or near to the HNB/HeNB. For example, LIPA or SIPTO allows direct access to the home based network, corporate network, or general Internet without going through the operator's core network. The establishment of the LIPA connections could be UE initiated based on local or operator provisioned policies or user input. On the other hand, the SIPTO connections are initiated by the network, e.g. by monitoring the location of the terminal and triggering a disconnection and reconnection when necessary to relocate the gateways.
Using the NSWO, the UE is able to access general Internet or local network resources simultaneously with access to the operator's core network (NPD 2). The UE makes use of user preference, operator provisioned policies, and local environment parameters to decide on which traffic should be routed via the NSWO. The use of the NSWO does not prevent the UE perform other connections.